Two
newspaper vendors flew out of Newark Airport on 11 September 2001. Gul
Mohammed Shah and Mohammed Azmath were apprehended the next day on a train,
allegedly with box cutters. [1] They reported facing
numerous abuses while detained in New York and New Jersey, including being
slammed, shackled, into walls. Prompted by the media, a government
investigation found videos of guards doing essentially what these detainees
recounted. [2] Federal officials would later clear the pair
of terrorism ties and charge them with credit card fraud.

Within weeks of the fatal Tuesday, Long Island convenience store clerk
Javaid Iqbal (originally of Pakistan) and Times Square restaurateur Ehab
Elmaghraby (of Egypt) arrived at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
They sued, charging that guards had kicked them, dragged them, slammed them
into walls, cursed them as “terrorists” and “Muslim bastards,” and subjected
them to needless strip-searches, including one during which guards pushed a
flashlight into Elmaghraby’s rectum, then denied him medical help.
[3] Elmaghraby was taken from his Queens flat when agents
were investigating the building’s owner, who had once applied for flight
lessons. Iqbal was arrested by agents apparently following a tip about false
identification cards. In his apartment they found a Time magazine
showing the trade towers in flames and an immigration receipt indicating
that Iqbal was in Manhattan on the 11th of September. Elmaghraby and Iqbal
eventually pleaded guilty to minor criminal charges unrelated to terrorism,
they maintain, only to escape the torment they endured for the better part
of a year. They were then deported.

Hundreds of men in similar circumstances were detained and tried in secret.
[4] Beginning in late 2001, the Justice Department
interviewed thousands of young non-citizens, based solely on their age, sex,
date of arrival, and country of origin. Virtually all were Arabs or Muslims.

Intensified after 2001, the association between terror and Muslims, Arabs,
and Arab-Americans is not a new phenomenon. In 1979, after 66 U.S. hostages
were taken in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “all the elements of the United
States government were mobilized, due to the intense personal interest and
commitment of President Carter.” [5] The stage was set for
the “war on terror”: Ronald Reagan suggested that those in the captured
embassy could be better considered “prisoners of war” than hostages.
Questioning of Arabs and Muslims went on throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The heightened level of scrutiny also appeared in Attorney General John
Ashcroft’s application of registration laws to people from 25 listed
countries, in a scheme to trace over a hundred thousand visitors. Visitor
registration entered the Immigration Act of 1952 as part of the McCarthy era
Alien Registration Act, but had gathered dust for fifty years until Ashcroft
decided to revive it, instruct local police to check registrants’ names
against the National Crime Information Center database, and arrest and
detain anyone who failed to register or had apparently overstayed a visa.
Some registrants were questioned about their religious and political beliefs
and had to provide names and contact information for family members, and
other personal details such as video rental cards and bank account
information. [6] Between November 2002 and September 2003,
177,260 Asian, North African, and the Middle Eastern boys and men appeared
for registration. [7] The Bush Administration put 13,799 in
deportation proceedings, detaining nearly 3000 of them. The press had
trouble sorting the numbers. The Washington Post would state, “In
truth there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of immigrants, mostly Arabs
and other Muslims, who would not be in detention but for Sept. 11, and who
are now wending their way through a capricious and choked-up immigration
system.” [8] The interviews produced “not one shred of
evidence.” [9]

The modern history of detentions in New York and New Jersey, holding areas
for most of the political detainees on U.S. soil, paints a troubling picture
of the culture that awaits those who are ordered detained. In 1993, Esmor
Correctional Services Corporation severely underbid Wackenhut Corrections
Corporation in order to win a contract to open a detention hall for
non-citizens several miles south of New York City, in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
[10] In 1995, a rebellion by visa-related detainees and
asylum-seekers shut the hall down. A government investigation of Esmor’s
performance, initiated before the uprising, would find a “corporate policy”
of withholding problems from the government, and “a systematic methodology
designed...to control the general detainee population and to intimidate and
discipline obstreperous detainees through use of corporal punishment.”
[11] A police SWAT team quelled the uprising with tear
gas. Twenty-five detainees from Albania, India, Ghana, and elsewhere were
removed to New Jersey’s Union County Jail, where they were made to crawl
naked past guards, and forced to chant “America is Number One.”
[12] Guards shoved heads into toilets and broke an
inmate’s collarbone. [13] In 1996, Corrections Corporation
of America took over the Elizabeth site; yet disturbing stories continued to
ooze from this converted New Jersey warehouse. [14]

Wardens to the World

Commercial policing and detention have become international in scope, and in
the past decade, private military services have grown into an industry
representing about $100 billion in revenue. [15] In 2001,
the firms spent millions in political contributions. [16]
Leading donors were Halliburton and DynCorp, both with connections in the
detentions business. [17] The Blackwater security firm has
retained the Alexander Strategy Group -- an influential lobbying corporation
chaired by Ed Buckham, former chief of staff to House Majority Whip Tom
DeLay. The firm has also employed DeLay’s spouse. [18]

Of approximately $4 billion in monthly costs for the occupation of Iraq, as
much as a third goes to these and other private contractors.
[19] Key services include prison construction. And there is no dearth of
detainees to store. In April 2004, 200 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers, after
refusing to fight in Fallujah, were stripped of their badges and confined
under military supervision. [20] The U.S.-led coalition
holds thousands in Abu Ghraib alone, where children as young as 11 are
locked in dark rooms. [21] In May of 2004, the Guardian
reported a figure of “40,000 people in U.S. custody since last year’s
invasion.” [22] As early as March of 2003, the U.S. was
detaining U.S. military police officers themselves in connection with a
prisoner-abuse case that included allegations of “indecent acts” and cruelty
during a period encompassing a riot which ended with the death of three
detainees. [23]

Lane McCotter was one of a group of officials selected by John Ashcroft to
restyle Iraq’s criminal justice system. In 1997, McCotter had resigned under
pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections after a
schizophrenic inmate died while shackled naked to a restraining chair for 16
hours. [24] McCotter subsequently became director of
business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based
private prison company, one of whose jails was being criticized by state and
federal officials for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care when
McCotter was sent to Iraq as part of a team that oversaw the re-opening of
Abu Ghraib prison.

A
report completed by Major General Antonio M. Taguba in early 2004 would
describe numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal
abuses” at Abu Ghraib, including rapes, beatings, and the use of attack
dogs. The report urged disciplinary action against two interrogators
employed by Virginia-based CACI International. [25] Also
cited is Titan of San Diego, whose board once boasted former CIA Director
James Woolsey, and whose employees occupy a jurisdictional grey area that
raises questions about the U.S. government’s ability to out-source prisoner
abuse on foreign soil. [26]

The demand for private services is poised to grow as the U.S. establishes
areas of concentrated control. The assault on Fallujah by 10,000 soldiers
began six days after the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, and it turned the
city’s residents into refugees. [27] In December, the
Boston Globe reported U.S. military plans to funnel Fallujans back in via
“citizen processing centers” on the outskirts of town where files of their
identities would be constructed, using DNA testing and retina scans.
Residents will reportedly receive badges to wear at all times, displaying
their addresses. Civilian vehicles will be banned. One idea floated by the
U.S. would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions of
construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons. Lieutenant Colonel
Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team,
complained that previous attempts to win Iraqis’ trust had “telegraphed
weakness by asking, ‘What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?’”
Comparing such attitudes to “Oprah,” Bellon asserted, “They want to figure
out who the dominant tribe is and say, ‘I’m with you.’ We need to be the
benevolent, dominant tribe.” [28]

Processing the Data

The biometrics industry devises methods of distinguishing individuals
bodies, using such identifiers as fingerprints, voice analyses, retina and
iris patterns, hand geometry, and facial recognition. Most of the global
biometrics revenue is generated in the U.S. market, and U.S. companies are
poised to benefit substantially from the proliferation of related
technology. The United States Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator
Technology (“US-VISIT”) now collects biometric information from people
entering and leaving the U.S.; this system alone, according to Forbes.com,
could represent $20 billion over the next five to ten years.
[29] Needs include merging the myriad technologies and filing systems
used by the government to track non-citizens, criminal suspects and others,
as well as implementing the technology at U.S. consulates and embassies
abroad. The new Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, passed in
December of 2004, authorizes funding for a series of technology enhancements
to the database run by the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network.

The hunger for data seems insatiable. The U.S. government obtained personal
information, such as voting and driving records, of millions of foreigners
under an agreement signed in September 2001 with ChoicePoint, the
information company involved in the Florida voter list purge prior to the
2000 presidential election. [30] Preliminary findings by
Mexican investigators show that ChoicePoint bought voting lists from a
Mexican database for $250,000, then leased access to the Department of
Homeland Security’s Quick Response Team. Thereafter, ChoicePoint signed
agreements that would total $78 million to give John Ashcroft details of
over 300 million people in Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras,
Nicaragua, and Guatemala -- all, presumably, potential terror suspects. As
the matter involves violations of privacy and political rights, National
Autonomous University law professor Jorge Camil suggested a class action by
sixty-five million affected Mexicans, but added that “U.S. courts do not
listen to Mexico.” [31]

Intelligence priorities are, in some cases, steering university research in
the U.S. Recent research supported by the U.S. intelligence community has
included a project at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York that
involves the monitoring of chat rooms, beginning in January 2005, in order
to develop automated eavesdropping techniques. [32] The
university site introduces the work as prompted by university researchers:

In the wake of the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001,
it became clear to experts worldwide that international terrorist
organizations -- Al-Qaeda in particular -- rely heavily on
cybercommunications for their planning. This prompted a group of Rensselaer
researchers in the departments of computer science and decision sciences and
engineering systems to start developing techniques for modeling the
evolution of social groups in Web chat rooms, newsgroups, and bulletin
boards, with the specific goal of detecting potentially harmful groups.
[33]

Just days after the international press reported a call from U.S. Central
Command chief General John Abizaid for controls to prevent electronic media
from being used by groups such as al-Qaeda, [34] the
Central Intelligence Agency’s former director, George Tenet, argued for new
Internet security controls. [35] At a recent
information-technology security conference, Tenet stated, “I know that these
actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet
is a free and open society with no control or accountability, but ultimately
the Wild West must give way to governance and control.” Asserting that the
Internet “represents a potential Achilles’ heel for our financial stability
and physical security,” Tenet said, “The Internet’s open architecture allows
Web surfing, but that openness makes the system vulnerable,” and called for
industry to deliver products to government and private customers “with a new
level of security and risk management already built in.”

The Future

Today’s administration pushes for still broader law enforcement authority.
The Department of Homeland Security has included the pursuit of a “fugitive
population of 400,000 illegal aliens ordered removed” in its plan for Fiscal
Year 2005. [36] So far, more than 7,000 people have been
detained through this ten-year plan, called Endgame. [37]
The new Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act augments its border
patrol force and its immigration detention capacity for each fiscal year
from 2006 to 2010. It also tightens restrictions on bail, increasing the
possibility of indefinite detention in alleged terrorism cases,
[38] while broadening the definitions of terrorist crimes
and expanding the list of predicate crimes for the crimes of money
laundering and providing material support or resources to designated foreign
terrorist organizations.

At the same time the U.S. repels prominent Muslims such as Tariq Ramadan
from teaching U.S. residents about Muslim society, the U.S. insists on
teaching the Muslim and Arab world its own dominant economic and political
views. Title VII of the 2004 terrorism law, named the “911 Commission
Implementation Act of 2004,” includes “findings regarding the importance of
economic development in combating the breeding grounds for terrorism,” thus
approving funding for the Middle East Partnership Initiative; and it
“expresses the Sense of Congress that a significant portion of those fund
should be made available to promote the rule of law in the Middle East.”

Promotion of the rule of law in the Middle East will be inextricably woven
with the promotion of business opportunities in the United States, which
include the warehousing of large swaths of targeted non-criminal communities
by exploiting and perpetuating the idea that many of those caught had posed
a threat to Western communities. Control over such people has become a
global phenomenon, as the U.S. government builds an ever more labyrinthine
system of obstacles between freedom and the people it deems fit to be caged.

Lee Hall teaches immigration law as a
member of the Adjunct Faculty of Law at Rutgers University in Newark, New
Jersey, and can be reached at:
leehall@sprynet.com.